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Installing Linux Way Back When


  1. Reserve a weekend or two with no other activities planned. A whole week is not unreasonable.
  2. Read books (no Google or Wikipedia or Stackoverflow yet). Actually, scratch that, no books either -- learn from whatever bits of data you can get your hands on, typically in Usenet news groups.
  3. Get comfortable, make sure you have enough food in the house.
  4. Connect up your brand spanking new 2400-baud modem to your university's mainframe computer. You could also order them by US mail (which may be faster).
  5. Choose one of a handful of available linux distributions (all free, all open-source).
  6. Start downloading floppy disk images (and I don't mean pictures of floppy disks). CD-ROM drives don't exist yet, or you are not rich enough to afford one.
    • Every time the modem drops the connection, you have to restart the current download
    • Every time a single floppy disk is done, you have to manually take it out and put another one in. Some will be bad. You will probably run out of good ones before you are done.
    • Repeat the above 40-80 times, depending on what modules you actually want in your installed version and whether or not you have splurged on double-density 1.44MB floppies (your phone's internal memory, not counting SD cards, is thousands of times bigger).
    • You will realize when you are done that you missed a package you really wanted when you were configuring your download. If you really really need it, you have to start from the beginning.
  7. Install a couple of small programs that can make your system inoperable the next time you reboot.
  8. Reboot and cross your fingers or pray (at this point, religious or not, you are likely praying).
  9. Three or more days after you started, you boot successfully, and now the months-long quest for device drivers commences (so you can use a mouse, or speakers, or any kind of graphical window manager).
  10. If you think I'm making this up, go ahead and check, plenty of examples are still out there.

(I've done this more than 10 times.)

To be fair:

  • It would take 1,713 3.5″ floppy disks to contain all the Windows 8 goodness
  • 1,713 3.5″ floppy disks stacked on top of each other would be 5.7 meters high
  • 1,713 3.5″ floppy disks lined together would be 167 meters long
  • A set of 1,713 3.5″ floppy disks would occupy 1 cubic meter of space (enough to tightly fit a baby elephant)

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